In the cotton industry, the normal method of banding or tying cotton bales has been to have workmen individually direct a tie, such as a band or wire, around a bale by hand and then secure the ends of the tie as appropriate depending on the design of the tie.
One such manual bale-tying operation is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,477,363 to Trumbo, which is incorporated herein by this reference.
The aforementioned Trumbo patent discloses that a bale, such as a bale of cotton, can be tied using a plurality of wires that have preformed interlocking ends. In such a bale-tying operation, two workmen are normally required (one on each side of the baling press) to bend the wires and to secure the ends of the wires together in a wire tie guide assembly. The wires normally are tied together one at a time.
Since a plurality of wires are required to properly secure a cotton bale, e.g., a "universal density" cotton bale requires eight wires, a manual bale-tying process can take a substantial amount of time.
The amount of time it takes to tie a cotton bale is important since the process of pressing the next bale cannot be started until the preceding bale has been tied and removed from the press.
Therefore, an apparatus (and process) is needed in the art for tying bales, e.g., with wires such as those disclosed by Trumbo, that is designed for easy operation by one workman to reduce labor costs while at the same time can complete the bale-tying operation in less time than is required by the above-described manual process.